


it's a love story after all

by nicalyse



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-21
Updated: 2012-10-21
Packaged: 2017-11-16 19:01:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/542788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicalyse/pseuds/nicalyse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She walks between them, her hands resting lightly on their forearms, and she knows that they make a pretty picture. It is only from the inside that you can see how precariously they are stitched together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's a love story after all

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt _this is the essence of love and failure_ for softly_me.

It is an accident. A happy accident.

Happy is a relative term.

"I love you, Elena." 

There is blood on his lips, lingering on his tongue, in his mouth. The beast inside of her wants it, relishes the base idea of the taste of blood and him together. Familiar. Wrong. Perfectly right.

Elena ignores the beast. Licks her own lips.

There is blood there, too.

"Don't," she says. She moves to push her hair behind her ear, but stops when she sees the blood on her hands.

"I do. I love you." He repeats the words in a whisper too quiet for human ears.

She pauses to look at him. Slumped shoulders, blood on his chin, hands hanging uselessly at his sides.

"I don't know what that means any more." What it means for him, to him. 

What it means to her.

She leaves him there when she walks away, leaves him standing over the body of what was once a boy with dark hair and darker eyes and is now just a corpse.

*

"I thought we were back on blood bags," he says when she walks into the cottage. Boarding house. Cabin. Villa. Never just a house.

Never a home.

"What?" She was distracted when she came in, listening to see if he was here alone or if there was someone else. She is distracted now, pouring herself a tumbler of gin.

Bourbon has never been her drink like it is theirs.

"I can smell it on you," he says, tilting his head just a tick to the left with the unspoken question, like a bird might do, or perhaps a dog.

She gulps gin, lets the taste of resin obliterate the lingering flavor of blood. "It happens, right?" She shrugs a shoulder, delicate, not quite careless when he blinks. "Monsters with devouring mouths, etcetera." 

It happens every few decades. One of them snaps. Breaks.

And the others follow, allow themselves to come unstitched.

Take advantage.

Elena watches him over the rim of her glass as she drinks, watches the way that his eyes take her in from head to toe, the same way he did decades ago, back when she was still human and breakable, as if he's searching for a wound, a gaping tear in her flesh.

He won't find one. They're all hidden on the inside.

He's responsible for quite a few of them, come to think of it.

She drains the glass and sets it on the cart. "Are you mad?" she asks. "Or disappointed?"

"No." He smiles, just a little. "Have you heard from my brother?"

Elena shakes her head. She hasn't in months, but she isn't worried. None of them ever stays gone for long.

A few years is little more than a trickle of sand when you live forever.

He nods, coming close and taking her hands in his. He leans down, brushes his lips over the top of her head and inhales her scent - expensive shampoo and gin and blood and dirt - his thumbs stroking over her knuckles. "There's blood under your fingernails."

She laughs on an exhale, barely a laugh at all. "It happens," she quips again, words that he said to her years ago, back when having someone's blood beneath her fingernails sent her into a panic and the only thing that could soothe her was his hands on her face. She tips her head up as if to kiss him but nips at his lower lip instead.

He hums, low in his throat, and brings his hand up to tangle in her hair, tugging gently until she looks up at him. "I love you like this, you know that?"

Elena stiffens in his arms, her heart's rhythm faltering. "Don't," she warns, so familiar. Achingly familiar, like a song on the radio. You hate it because it makes you sad, but you like it too, so you never change the station when it comes on, even when it seems to be everywhere, played over and over.

And over. And over.

His eyes sharpen, glinting bright. "Don't what? Tell you I love you?" She closes her eyes, but remains otherwise perfectly still, even as he makes a frustrated noise and tightens his grip in her hair until it's painful. "Elena."

 _Because every time we say it, we fuck it up,_ she doesn't say.

She's said it before. It doesn't make a difference.

He leaves when it becomes clear that she isn't going to respond, stalking out of the room on heavy feet, slamming the front door so hard that one of the stained glass panels shatters.

Elena pours herself another glass of gin, drinking it in slow sips as she cleans up the glass in the hallway, the shards glittering jewel bright on the dark wood, pinpricks of light in the night.

*

She threads her fingers into his hair when he worries her nipple between his teeth, torn between pushing him away and keeping him in place. His hands are everywhere, grazing her forearm and her hip, the spot to the right of her navel that makes her muscles twitch, leaving a sensitized trail along the inside of her thigh. He likes her desperate and writhing, likes to work her to the edge and make her beg when he's patient enough for it.

A breathless _please_ is such a nice sound, whether spoken in pleasure or pain.

It's a game, seeing who will snap first. Who will break.

Elena arches beneath him when he grazes his fingertips over her clit, teasing, just enough to make her frantic. He catches her wrists in one hand when she reaches for him, pins her arms above her head against the pillow, his eyes shining when he pulls back just enough to watch her face. Their pounding hearts, rhythms just out of sync, fill her ears, the scent of sweat and arousal and wild honeysuckle outside the open window heavy in the air, and him, him with his weight over her and his fingers slick and clever--

" _Please_ ," she finally gasps, less patient than he is tonight. She wants him, all of him, right now.

Now nearly always trumps forever in the pursuit of pleasure, Elena has found.

He moves sleekly over her, inside of her, touches carefully designed to bring her to the edge without pushing her over, maddeningly controlled.

Times like these, she wants to tear him apart.

As if she hasn't managed to unravel him at the seams a dozen times before.

She comes with a cry, sinking her fingernails into his back and her teeth into his shoulder, drawing blood, steeping her senses in him, pulling him even closer when he moans and tenses above her.

Elena is boneless, a languid, barely conscious heap when his fangs pierce the soft curve of her breast, triggering something that is more than an aftershock but not quite another orgasm, stealing unnecessary breath from her lungs. "God," she breathes, trailing light fingertips over the smooth skin of his back. "I love you."

She keeps her eyes closed when he moves even though she knows that he's looking at her face, searching for something they both know he won't find.

"I know you do," he finally replies, voice low and rough.

*

After a while, they stop coming up with a story to tell and let people believe whatever they want to believe. It isn't he most subtle way to live, letting rumors fly the way they do, but it's better than the way that they started out.

The invitation comes addressed to the three of them, together. A party. An event, one that demands tuxedos and ball gowns, a somehow inescapable piece of their lives.

Elena wears red, her hair pulled up and away from her face, a diamond necklace taken from a Russian oligarch's daughter around her throat. They look at her like she's beautiful when she comes down the stairs, eyes bright and mouths curved.

They look at her like they love her. Her heart aches, battered and bruised.

She walks between them, her hands resting lightly on their forearms, and she knows that they make a pretty picture.

It is only from the inside that you can see how precariously they are stitched together.

*

They are in bed together, the three of them, a tangle of limbs and sheets, puzzle pieces that only fit together when laid just right, placed with the best of intentions.

"I love you," one of them whispers into the darkness.

Fingers twitch and and a heart stutters. Whose is unclear.

"Show me," comes the reply, soft, with the barest hint of challenge. As if it was a lie.

Elena trembles when they touch her, when she touches them, when they touch each other, touches that mean more than any words they've ever spoken.

They take each other apart so they can put one another back together again.


End file.
